So, somewhere around 2009-2013,
Continue reading “Fanficcing With Claude AI”Shadow Captain Joins A Book Sale!
Hans G. Schantz has very kindly agreed to include Shadow Captain, the first of my two space operas, in one of his gigantic book sales, which is going on right now. Click here to check out all the possibilities, and happy reading!
Austenian: The Other Parents in Emma The Novel
As previously stated, we are using Ellen Moody’s 1813-1814 calendar for the main events of Emma, because I don’t see any obvious reason not to.
Continue reading “Austenian: The Other Parents in Emma The Novel”PSA: Anthropic Changes Its Policy on Training on Consumer Inputs
https://www.anthropic.com/news/updates-to-our-consumer-terms
Basically you need to opt out to tell them you don’t want them to use your convos with Claude AI in training newer Claudes. It’s a fairly obvious popup but it defaults to yes and if you’re like me, you want to slide it to no.
Austenian: The Parents of Emma Woodhouse, and Their Friends, The Knightleys
A quick Gutenberg skim on my part showed no days-of-week directly linked to days-of-month in the text, such as seen in P&P or Mansfield. Jo Modert, whose work I do not have direct access to, says that the main events of Emma seem to be mapped to an almanac for 1814-1815. Ellen Moody, after citing Modert, maps the novel instead to 1813-1814, for reasons that are not obvious to me. The only cultural reference known to point to anything earlier is Miss Bates getting confused about whether Ireland counts as a separate kingdom or not. Miss Bates is both ditzy and insular, so her continuing to get confused on this point long after it was a topical issue is plausible. Thus, this cultural reference doesn’t really wed Emma to a particular timeframe the way the soldiers billeted upon Meryton does with P&P. For once, I’m accepting Moody’s calendar without modifications. Mostly because I really don’t care that much about this novel, which weds considerable brilliance of technique, mood and psychology to two fairly unpleasant heroines, manipulative Emma Woodhouse and self-martyring Jane Fairfax. The only female characters in this one that I am at all fond of are Miss Bates and Harriet Smith.
Continue reading “Austenian: The Parents of Emma Woodhouse, and Their Friends, The Knightleys”Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 2
As previously indicated, I am interpreting the main body of Mansfield Park’s plot as happening in 1796-1797. However, the age indicators for most of the characters in this essay are very vague. Tom Bertram is apparently 25 during the main body of the plot, and I have randomly assumed that Henry Crawford is around that age, and that his sister Mary Crawford and their acquaintance John Yates are rather younger.
Continue reading “Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 2”Friday Fragments
A conversation elsewhere reminded me that Whisper’s raw transcriptions of dictation can be a bit…alarming, so I am showing three versions of a text chunk below. This demonstrates my dictation workflow but in reverse order. For clarity, the first thing you will see is my final-ish draft, followed by what I was working from: Claude’s cleanup of a Whisper transcription, using the commands I’ve shown in the past. The last thing you’ll see is what Claude was working from: Whisper’s transcription of an audio file I dictated.
Continue reading “Friday Fragments”Saving a Queen is now working again
Safe to buy it now! Thank you for your patience. Between that hiccup and my failure to e-sign the hours worked for day job in a timely fashion, it’s been a slightly harrowing 24 hours, but both issues got sorted.
We now return you to our irregularly scheduled programming.
Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 1
Ellen Moody admits that only 1796-1797 fully works with the two strongly given dates in the text (Thursday, December 22 for the ball at Mansfield, and a “particularly late” Easter the following spring) but goes with R. W. Chapman’s 1808-1809 dates for the main body of the story, with a bit of handwaving about how the novel is obviously pieced together from partial drafts written at different times, and the “particularly late Easter” is merely an artifact of that process. Here, I am going with the 1796-1797 timeframe for the main plot, which I consider to start with the arrival of the Crawfords and the testing of Edmund and Fanny, and backdating accordingly. But the calendar of the book is heavily debated by scholars, and if you’re doing some sort of crossover work with the elder generation of another Austen novel, you have a lot of room to fudge the timeframes with this one.
This novel is comparatively easy, in that we have three sisters and their husbands and maybe two other, basically offscreen, sets of parents to keep track of. We start with the fabulous Miss Wards: Miss Elizabeth(1) Ward, Miss Maria Ward and Miss Frances Ward. They were apparently all three of them very good-looking, possibly blonde(1.5) with seven thousand pounds apiece(2) which translates to 350 pounds a year or 87.5 pounds a quarter.
Continue reading “Austenian: The Parents of Mansfield Park, Part 1”Please do not buy Saving a Queen right now
For some reason, a different book in the series is showing up with that cover when I buy it and look at it. I won’t get a chance to troubleshoot sooner than late this evening after dayjob. I apologize for the inconvenience.
Jaglion Press 